Ram compression called CRAM? I’m sold
The person who came up with this acronym is probably proud of their work lol
Now the fun part. What would Microsoft name it?
Copilot
Microsoft MemoryOne X Expansion Framework Subsystem. And it would require 64GB of RAM to do the compression, thus defeating the purpose of it existing in the first place, would break whenever the Edge browser updates for no discernible reason, and would about once a year cause your Documents folder to disappear.
How dare you! Microsoft would never publish software that utilizes system resources so well.
CRAP
MSCrap
( C )opilot ( R )AM ( A )utomated ( P )owerup
Isn’t it just ZRAM but with a C?
So there are some benefits to the ram crisis? People actually optimize things because of limited resources.
When I was in computer science in college back in the 1900s, they told us that the USSR was responsible for some of the best algorithms still in use at the time (both for RAM and CPU usage) because they just had less to work with.
Guess we’re all in that boat now.
You know it’s getting weird out there when Meta seems to be doing something that’s actually useful.
They’ve been doing useful engineering things since the start, it’s just that it pales in comparison to all the bad things
Whenever big tech companies like Meta do useful things like support Overture Maps Foundation (which is also supported by Microsoft and Amazon) they are doing it to blunt some competitive advantage another tech company has, such as google in this case. They support open source insofar as they can’t monetize whatever they are open sourcing.
they ain’t doing it for us, they’re doing it for themselves.
ZSTD and BTRFS, among many other smaller things, hello?
This is still just a bandaid over running 10 copies of chromium for each electron app.
That certainly seems to be a genre of article right now.
Cloudflare frees up 100TB of RAM by shrinking 1.1.1.1’s DNS cache entries
MSI promises an EXPO ULL-like boost for your existing DDR5 memory
Microsoft vows to make Windows 11 fly on 8GB RAM amid memory shortage
Microsoft vows to make Windows 11 fly on 8GB RAM amid memory shortage
I feel like they might want to start with something a little simpler, like landing the first humans on Jupiter or making Windows 11 fly on 1024GB RAM.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Title is a bit misleading, and I think intentionally, which kinda irks me. It isn’t a 400x speedup of RAM by means of compression. If I understood correctly, it’s 400x speedup compared to disk read for swap.
Please correct me if I’m wrong here. I’d love some positive news from the IT world that isn’t depressive. (edit: I implied this wasn’t. It is. I’m just not sure of the actual impact)
It’s a little better than your read. The ~400x speedup is in comparison to using ZRAM, which, in very brief terms, compresses memory by creating an in-memory compressed block device and assigning that as your swap space. So your “swap” is actually a compressed chunk of RAM, not on disk.
This was significantly slower than normal memory access because page faulting when looking up something in memory then fetching from swap was, itself, expensive. Regardless of how fast that swap was. When your swap is on a storage device that overhead is comparatively tiny, but when it’s just another chunk of memory suddenly it’s what you’re spending most of your time on.
Fuck yea, RAM swap? I bought both my laptop and desktop when RAM was cheap, and got more memory than I needed. I can safely allocate like 12GB to CRAM!
The win from CRAM is that it is not swap, and operates using mostly normal RAM semantics. If it works as advertised you should be able to allocate most (all?!) of your RAM as CRAM.
Finally! I can download more RAM!
This idea comes out of the woodwork ever time RAM gets expensive.
I feel like ZRAM showed up when prices were historically low
Pshaw! Who needs zram when you could use RAM Doubler™?
I can carry nearly 80 gigs of data in my head. One sixty if l use a doubler.
Wait I think I’ve already been here
I remember this trash:
this one was one of the bullshit ones. iirc, underneath it just made your swap bigger
Why does it look like a heatmap of someone stroking their giant dick?
Aww yeah! Time to CRAM some memory!
Compressed RAM
Compressed CRAM
Ah, the old download more RAM trick. An oldie but a goodie.
CRAM is an utterly goated name
meh needs special hardware
Too bad, this isn’t happening as a kernel patch. Adding to that point:
The key detail is that CRAM is a hardware implementation of compression, meaning the logic is in the memory controller rather than in software, so it’s not a pure software trick like ZRAM. However, it uses standard off-the-shelf DRAM and a normal memory bus, so no exotic modules or custom interfaces are required.
